How to Supercharge your Marketing Operational Effectiveness

Having developed numerous marketing master calendars for Fortune clients world-wide, here are top 10 lessons learned & best practices for developing a marketing planning master calendar:

1) All involved marketing & supporting departments must have input into the development of, and be fully represented on the master marketing calendar.

2) All the departments represented on the calendar in must understand their responsibilities, deliverables, due dates, inter-dependencies with other departments as well as the metrics that they are being held accountable for in each step in the process.

3) Process Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) shall be in place for each process handoff such that the overall calendar timeline retains tactical delivery integrity.

4) The calendar must be chronologically intuitive (flow left to right for each sequential major marketing event).

5) Process details must be developed for each major milestone represented on the marketing calendar.

6) A process step owner must be identified for each process step with clear articulation of their responsibilities.